Brings lights on in shops
Above race-guides and rosaries,
A funeral passes.
The hearse is ahead,
But after there follows
A troop of streetwalkers
In wide flowered hats,
Leg-of-mutton sleeves,
And ankle-length dresses.
There is an air of great friendliness,
As if they were honouring
One they were fond of;
Some caper a few steps,
Skirts held skilfully
(Someone claps time),
And of great sadness also.
As they wend away
A voice is heard singing
Of Kitty, or Katy,
As if the name meant once
All love, all beauty.
Minutes after the funeral oration for the honest old whore of literature, before leaving Glasnevin, they stand looking at a sign on the cemetery wall near the exit that prohibits cars from going over twenty miles an hour as they’re leaving. There’s laughter at the sign, maybe in an attempt to diffuse some of the tension that’s built up in the last few minutes. The French couple talk to the street vendor. Beyond them, the two cadaverous-looking tramps are still sitting on their bench. Far away, the screech of a seagull seems to imitate a crow. Or is it a crow?
“Let’s get out of here,” Javier says emphatically. Everyone seems to agree. They go back to Milly Bloom’s song, which they all sing happily now, as if they’d just escaped from an awful nightmare. Yes, that’s enough of this place.
They speed up and look as if they’ve just arrived from a trip to the country. The railings of Ulysses are slowly left behind. And that fragment:
“The gates glimmered in front: still open. Back to the world again. Enough of this place.”
At the very gates of the cemetery is the ancient pub, Kavanagh’s, also known as the Gravediggers. This pub isn’t named in Joyce’s chapter, but nevertheless it was here in 1904, next to the gates. It’s a squalid place, as far as they can see, which must have a hair-raising atmosphere late at night, something no one here doubts in the slightest, as already, right now in the evening light, at first glance and from outside, you can see that the very structure of the bar itself is reverberating and shuddering, as if about to explode.
Action: After all the ups and downs of the day, everyone goes into the Gravediggers set on sinking down to the bottom somehow. They go in very thirstily.
The Rotunda always was a good excuse to take to drink.
The customers of the Gravediggers have literally turned the pub into pandemonium. At this time of day, the Gravediggers is the capital of Hell, the city of Satan and his acolytes, the city built by fallen angels. It’s at the opposite extreme from the Pantheon in Paris, for example. That sobriety, that elegance. Riba has started thinking of Paris again, of all things French. He interprets it as a passing nostalgia for the time of his admiration of Paris. That pantheon, those serene spaces where one can try to reunite all the gods.
The poet Milton made it possible for one to imagine the capital of Hell, Pandemonium, as a very small place. The demons had to make themselves tiny to get into it. Here, in this bar in Dublin, all the customers seem to have reduced their size to be able to be with the rest of the monsters in such a reduced space. The preferred noise of the agitated clientele is a string of staccato chatter, like a hyena’s laugh or the shrieks of a baboon, getting slower at the same time as it acquires a shriller pitch.
They’re all proper atheists, the barman says, amusingly and absurdly, in a Spanish he assures them he learned in Barcelona. No one really understands what he’s talking about. The racket gets more deafening every night, the barman explains without explaining anything. No one knows what the relationship between the noise and atheism can be exactly, but it doesn’t seem like the best moment to explain. The deafening party continues. Riba, who now really can hear the cawing Bev said she heard before, imagines that the customers and other gravediggers are like crows who flap down onto the pub’s roof every evening at dusk, and then penetrate the most unlikely places in the tiny, hellish bar and growl, threatening each other and singing obscene songs about Milly Bloom and other invented ladies of Dublin, all dead now. And meanwhile the bar reverberates and shudders and the atmosphere is alcoholic to the most delirious extremes.
The Gravediggers presents the most serious temptation to drink Riba has encountered since he came out of his health crisis. Who knows, maybe the secret name of the pub is the Coxwold. Riba is terrified at the mere possibility of falling off the wagon again and doesn’t lose sight of the threat the infernal place poses. Perhaps it’s here that the prophetic, moving, and terrifying vision of his dream might come true, this vision to be found inside the same dream that’s led him to Dublin and to this cavern of crows vibrating with the terrible air of the end of a party as in the cantina El Farolito from that novel by Lowry he’s always admired so much.
Everyone here looks as if they’ve come from the cemetery, he’s thinking, and at that moment his cell phone rings. A call from Barcelona. It’s Celia phoning to tell him that she’s had a call from Calle Aribau and that his parents are indignant because he still hasn’t wished them a happy sixty-first wedding anniversary. Oh no, Riba thinks. He’d completely forgotten. Maybe Dublin has liberated him too much from his parents’ gentle tyranny.
“Where are you now?” Celia wants to know.
“In the Gravediggers. A pub on the outskirts.”
Perhaps he shouldn’t have said this. Being in a pub, and also the name of this one, could get him into trouble.
“No, Celia, I haven’t had a drop to drink. Don’t cry.”
“I’m not crying. What makes you think I’m crying?”
There’s too much noise in the pub. He goes outside so he can talk. The racket subsumes the entire area around the pub and the high railings. He has a long conversation with Celia and makes another mistake, because when he describes the bar he tells her it looks like that place after death, a world called hell. “I don’t like your vision of the other world,” she says in a dangerously Buddhist tone. He immediately tries to change the subject, but Celia wants to know if he’s sure he hasn’t had a drink. And he has to take a few minutes to calm her down. When he finally manages to soothe her, he hangs up and stands lost in the noisy atmosphere around the door to the Gravediggers. He stands there thinking about the Coxwold premonition. He dreamt that scene of inconsolable weeping with Celia at the entrance to the bar with such intensity that, even though it’s only the memory of a dream, it’s still one of the most impressive memories of his life. He came here to Dublin to encounter the sea, but also to encounter this unlived memory, this moment which, just as happened in his New York dream, has hidden within it something some people call the moment of true sensation. Because that weeping seemed to contain, in its most absolute fullness, the core of his existence, the secret universe of all his great love for Celia and infinite joy at being alive and also the tragedy of having been, two years ago, on the point of losing it all.
Perhaps Celia should be here now, and a couple of good drinks should have left the two of them crying emotionally, collapsed in an embrace on the floor, at the entrance to this hellish pub: fallen, but together forever in their love and in their essential weeping, and with Buddha’s permission, going through an intense experience of great epiphany, a moment right in the center of the world.